I think that phrase was coined in an era when the tech sector moved so fast that the prevailing law couldn't keep up. It caught up somewhat, but obviously there's still much leeway for improvement. Break all the wrong habits, rigid conventions and old traditions you want, just play along with the governing laws.
> the tech sector moved so fast that the prevailing law couldn't keep up
That's an extremely charitable interpretation.
A more realistic interpretation is that the law was up to date, just that enforcement couldn't keep up because 1) nobody expected such a brazen level of breaking the law and 2) justice doesn't really apply when you have enough capital.
IMO that phrase came about when old tech companies (the IBMs of the world) had
* waterfall
* design up-front
* source control systems that
* defaulted all files to read-only
* required you to "check-out" files, potentially locking other devs out from editing them [1]
* probably didn't have unit tests so "deploying to prod" meant "doing a full QA pass, done by human beings"
* there was no CI/CD (We had "Build Engineers")
In this context, pushing a change to SVN/git/hg, having tests run automatically, then having CI/CD push new code to production, all as a side-effect of one engineer push a button? That was moving fast, and occasionally, breaking the whole website. But we got better tests, better CI/CD, metrics, green/blue, ... We learned it was unequivocally better than the old way.
As far as I understood the original meaning, it was about "not being too careful", and err on the side of breaking things, in the name of moving forward faster.
It ended up meaning something else, but back then this is how I understood it.
I think that phrase was coined in an era when the tech sector moved so fast that the prevailing law couldn't keep up. It caught up somewhat, but obviously there's still much leeway for improvement. Break all the wrong habits, rigid conventions and old traditions you want, just play along with the governing laws.
> the tech sector moved so fast that the prevailing law couldn't keep up
That's an extremely charitable interpretation.
A more realistic interpretation is that the law was up to date, just that enforcement couldn't keep up because 1) nobody expected such a brazen level of breaking the law and 2) justice doesn't really apply when you have enough capital.
> A more realistic interpretation is that the law was up to date
While I wouldn't disagree with your sentiment, just keep in mind that the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) got implemented 2018.
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IMO that phrase came about when old tech companies (the IBMs of the world) had
In this context, pushing a change to SVN/git/hg, having tests run automatically, then having CI/CD push new code to production, all as a side-effect of one engineer push a button? That was moving fast, and occasionally, breaking the whole website. But we got better tests, better CI/CD, metrics, green/blue, ... We learned it was unequivocally better than the old way.
[1] Reserved Checkouts: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/clearcase/11.0.0?topic=ucm-check...
Its original intended meaning was sometimes breaking your social website, not laws.
As far as I understood the original meaning, it was about "not being too careful", and err on the side of breaking things, in the name of moving forward faster.
It ended up meaning something else, but back then this is how I understood it.
> I thought tech companies were supposed to move fast and break stuff.
This mentality is relatively new. Or more like invented by Facebook and got marketed the heck by PRs and marketing firms.
And now we have people who code before they think.
> And now we have people who code before they think.
Thanks to coding agents, now we can have engineers who do neither